& within days, as promised... excellent. I noticed a couple of new help files this morning, and then the editor itself...

There's plenty of discussion and help out there already. The big change seems to be as expected, that your hand-coding will have to be layouts compliant and that each new element of the page will have to be defined by its own widget. See the new and growing help pages.

For more, see

• Blogger Buzz
• Inside Google
• A Consuming Experience

Update: As he points out in the comments, Scott at Banana Stew has authored a template walkthrough that provides a great launch point as we all embark on learning this new template language. Great work, Scott!

Filed in: blogger blogger-hacks blogtech search google beta

Just got wind of an interesting new way to give your blog multiple colorschemes or "moods" without going to tons of effort to select colors that match. Pic2Color is a service that will derive a colorscheme from an image that you specify, and apply it to your blog. You could have multiple images in a menu for users to select, as you see on the Pic2Color demo page, or even set up an input box & allow users to submit their own pics in .jpg, .png or .gif format. This is an interesting complement to Aditya's stylesheet switcher for blogger, & will allow users to quickly choose their favorite colorscheme for your content, & package your goodies to reflect their mood.

To signup as an alpha tester, e-mail the Pic2Color folks. To input your e-mail to be on the waitlist for the beta, head to the signup page.

Pic2Color also announced yesterday that they now offer their first downloadable wordpress template.

Filed in: images pic2color blogtech webtech

A quickie. Amit at Digital Inspiration points out that you can drag & drop images and such into the compose window of GMail, even though you can't add the raw HTML to the signature field in "settings." I might be able to get my Feedburner Headline Animator in there after all... as long as I can keep it handy on the web somewhere for drag & drop purposes!

Filed in: google, gmail, feedburner, webtech, e-mail, feeds

It occurred to me that we haven't seen much innovation on the tag-display front since the heady days of tagclouds. Acting on a whim, I thought I try out a new approach ... TagPie!

Now, pie charts aren't particularly a good fit for this task. Firstly, tag counts rarely "add up to 100%" since there's a huge amount of overlap. Secondly, JavaScript does not lend itself to rendering graphs of any kind - but especially pie charts. Still, I found a free piechart provider (they use a PHP back-end to produce an image) in Gheos for proof-of-concept purposes.

So, it's not clickable, and isn't that flexible. But the concept is there - worth pursuing?

Filed in: blogtech, tags, graphics, del.icio.us

Michael's been at it again... This time extracting the search box from the navbar in Blogger Beta and allowing you to reposition it on your blog. His latest how-to [link updated] is a four-part tutorial in which you'll learn to:

1. Hide the navbar.

2. Construct the search box, and reposition it.

3. Resize the search box.

4. Change the appearance of the search button.

Grand! All sorts of goodies start to break through. Shora also has a new "especially for beta" hack for hiding the navbar, which is en espanol. Now, the "legality" of hacking the navbar has never been quite clear, & the new Terms of Service (if, indeed, these were the new Terms of Service) don't seem to clear things up. Section 10 is still Section 10, & modifying the navbar is probably still a violation of the Blogger TOS....

Important to note that in beta the navbar is a little less cluttered, and contains (at least for the moment) an interface to let you directly access features to edit your blog if you're already signed in.... so there are some tools that you'll lose if you tell the navbar goodbye.

Other pre-beta Navbar hacks were discussed here last Fall.

Update: Perhaps in response to TOS concerns, Michael's post now also contains information about how to reposition the navbar.

Filed in: blogger blogger-hacks blogtech search google beta

See also:

• Blogger Beta Feed URL's
• Get Blogger Beta Labels without Layouts!
• Blogger Beta for the Weekend
• Blogger Beta Update, Incl. Template News
• Beta Comment Notifications
• Beta Templates, Layouts, & Tags
• Under The Hood: Blogger's New Labels
• Blogger Beta Explored
• Significant Blogger Upgrade

The Del.icio.us Blog brings news of two new JSON feeds in addition to the existing tag and bookmark feeds. Now you can access your network and your fans in this format. The JSON help has also had an upgrade.

Getting a list of your network (and fans) should be straightforward. A bit more work and you can have featured tags and posts from those sources displayed too. Taking it a step further, Michael Schieben created the Delicious Network Explorer using this new tech. (Warning, Java Applet may take some time to load.)

This could also be the basis for new blogrolling or webring applications. The duality of network/fan lists means you'd get automatic link reciprocity: blogrolling me (ie add me to your network) automatically sees you blogrolled too (ie added to my fans). That's the sort of mechanism that could see networks really take off ... and "fan spam" (fam? Infamy?) too. Since you have no control over who adds you to their network (and hence becomes a fan of yours), it's prone to abuse.

What other possibilities and pitfalls do these new feeds present? Where might this new data go, and what might it do when it gets there? Thoughts in the comments please!

In other Del.icio.us news: Private feeds (in John's case the feed from links for you, specifically) have been placed behind an additional layer of security, and will need to be resubscribed.

Filed in: blogtech, feeds, webtech, readers, del.icio.us

Thanks to Scott from Banana Stew for laying out the new beta feed URL's in a comment here. This belongs front & center... The url's are laid out as follows:

The URL for the post feed is:

http://beta.blogger.com/feeds/blogID#/posts/full

The URL of the comment feed is:

http://beta.blogger.com/feeds/blogID#/comments/full

The URL of the per-post comment feed is:

http://beta.blogger.com/feeds/blogID#/postID#/comments/full

• The URL for the short form of each feed is at the same URL, but ends with /summary rather than /full.
• I would imagine that these feeds can still be run through Feedburner to gather & report accurate subscriber stats.
• To access these feeds in RSS 2.0 rather than Atom 1.0 format, append &alt=rss to the end of the URL, as described in Blogger Help.
• To find out your blogID, sign in to Blogger beta, then head to new post, or to manage posts, settings, or layout. In each case the end of the destination page URL will be your blog ID.
• To find out a post ID, head to a Beta post page, & select the "post a comment" link. The end of the "post a comment" URL is the post ID.

As discussed in the comments at The Last Word, the link to the whole blog comment feed seems to be awol for a significant number of users (me, Ramani, & Adi, at least), but the URL above holds up, & let me make a sidebar widget....

With this info in hand, I've road-tested Ramani's "recent comments in the sidebar" method on FreshblogBeta. To get this to work, log in to beta and select "layouts." Add a sidebar page element, & select "feed" from the list of options. Enter the feed URL (your beta blog's comment URL, for example) in the pop-up window, and an options window will appear.

This will give you the opportunity to change the title of the sidebar box, as well as to add dates & authors to the content titles. This means that you can add summaries of recent posts on related blogs, (as well as a quick & easy recent comments section) to your sidebar. Excellent.

One other feed-related issue. As Philipp points out in the update to his announcement, having the new feeds be beta URL's could later present a problem after everyone has migrated and the system isn't in beta anymore.

While we're walking through the beta, here's a round-up of recent discussion:

• Improbulus explores the detection of labels as tags by Technorati & not by Icerocket
  
• Julie walks through the current state of play for anyone who has the option to migrate & isn't sure whether to make the move. The comments on Julie's post also point up an anonymity issue. If your GMail account has your real (and / or whole) name, & your anonymity is valuable to you as a blogger, don't use that account to migrate with.
  
• Imp (again) has the scoop on updating your tagger userscripts so that they'll work in the beta. This fix points scripts to the new beta pages, and will work as long as the underlying functions are still possible, & only the locations of the pages that you want to modify have changed.
  
• Peter @ Blogger Tips & Tricks walks through the greatly simplified process of adding advertisements and affiliate content to your beta blog using layouts, which seems to have been a significant target of the upgrade.

Nice to breathe out, relax, & start to see the lay of the new beta land a little.

Filed in: google blogger blogtech webtech beta

See also:

• Get Blogger Beta Labels without Layouts!
• Blogger Beta for the Weekend
• Blogger Beta Update, Incl. Template News
• Beta Comment Notifications
• Beta Templates, Layouts, & Tags
• Under The Hood: Blogger's New Labels
• Blogger Beta Explored
• Significant Blogger Upgrade

Many bloggers like to bookmark their posts in del.icio.us, whether for their own reference, categories or just getting their links out there. Dealing with a large of collection of bookmarks can be quite unwieldy, especially if you're used to modern niceties likes search-and-replace, macros, wildcards and other "luxuries". Picking out and treating your bookmarks one at a time can be dispiriting. This post introduces a new service I knocked together over the weekend that makes it easy to update and edit your bookmarks wholesale.

The service is dubbed Scripted Re-Mark, since you use a script to "re-mark" your bookmarks. It grew out of my earlier experiments with automatic tagging and frustrations with migrating a blog.

*** Update ***
(There's a new release for Scripted Re-Mark that features zippier updates and functions-as-parameters.)

To use the service, you visit the page, play around with some search/replace rules and then copy/paste a code snippet into another window, opened up to your del.icio.us account. The code snippet zips through the bookmarks, making changes and saving the result.

You can search/replace on the Title, URL, Notes and Tags of your bookmarks, using as many rules as you like. (And, yes, you can use full regular expressions!) You can also set the sharing (public/private) properties. The service deals with the del.icio.us "rate limiter" for you, ensuring that you don't get locked out of your account for thrashing their servers.

Some possible uses:

• Site Migration: Change the domain name in the URLs of a bunch of bookmarks.


• Spelling Correction: As a favour, why not fix all the different flavours of spelling, without too much labour?


• Tag Migration: Delete, merge and rename tags in one hit. Or, add a common tag across a subset of your bookmarks to help with grouping.


• Share your Imports: By default, imported bookmarks are private; set them all free with a mass "tag and release program".

If you've got more ideas, please share them in the comments, including any regular expressions you come up with.

I've tested it under FireFox and Internet Explorer (I wept tears getting it to work in IE ...) but not Safari or Opera. If someone could let me know how it travels, that'd be great. Still, this is "beta" (not like Google - I mean beta) so please backup your bookmarks before committing anything.

The code is released under a Creative Common licence so feel free to "extend and embrace". Future ideas include allowing generic functions in the replace string, rolling in the auto-tagger for suggestions, deletion and, well, you tell me!

Filed in: blogtech, tags, bookmarklets, bookmarks, del.icio.us

Michael at Basang Panganip has figured out a way to add labels to your Blogger Beta blog, even if you're running without the new layouts in classic template mode. The how-to is lengthy because it is specific, but the process doesn't appear to be difficult. It involves:

1. Temporarily selecting a new template
2. Labelling all of your posts & keeping a cut & paste list of your labels
3. Reverting to your "classic" template after you've labelled your posts
4. Writing a hand-coded sidebar list of search strings for your labels
   

IMPORTANT: If you want to do this, please work from the full how-to and not from the summary above!

As we suspected, it seems that the only part of the labels system that is truly layouts-dependent is the default sidebar menu... and Michael has the scoop on how to build a perfectly serviceable substitute. Once again, let's see what happens when the HTML editor goes live....

Filed in: google blogger blogtech webtech labels categories beta

See also:

• Blogger Beta for the Weekend
• Blogger Beta Update, Incl. Template News
• Beta Comment Notifications
• Beta Templates, Layouts, & Tags
• Under The Hood: Blogger's New Labels
• Blogger Beta Explored
• Significant Blogger Upgrade

The deeper you dig, the more treasure you find! Ramani at Hackosphere has taken beta for a decent test-drive and finds several new features that once were hacks. These include:

• Next & Previous Post Links (here called newer & older)
  
• In-Post Display of Navbar Search results
• Manual selection of posting Dates & Times

Check out Ramani's post for the details, & see Aditya's expanding list o' features. Who knows what we'll find on Monday!

Filed in: google blogger blogtech webtech beta

See also:

• Blogger Beta Update, Incl. Template News
• Beta Comment Notifications
• Beta Templates, Layouts, & Tags
• Under The Hood: Blogger's New Labels
• Blogger Beta Explored
• Significant Blogger Upgrade

As part of the content becomes obsolete due to built-in Beta Blogger goodness, the Blogger Hacks Wiki is getting a goodly slice of link love. The Download Squad give a positive review, and link to a March 6th, 2000 post documenting the arrival of permalinks to the platform. It would be interesting to compare the buzz re: the arrival of comments (or permalinks) w/. the buzz that has greeted the arrival of categories.

I added a section to the main page to suggest that the wiki will be overhauled as soon as the dust settles. I'm reluctant to delete content, but perhaps we could label certain pages as superceded by default offerings? Add your thoughts to the comments.

The dust settles, some folks dig in & take a good look, and a 2nd round of reviews & user insights emerge.

• Annie at BlogU made the switch, keeping the non-layouts "classic" template, and everything except Freshtags made the migration with her. We're investigating....
  
• Aditya notes that few of the usual suspects have migrated. We haven't because we can't (team blog), but like many others I think we're waiting for the HTML template editor too, so that our widgets can come with us when we move! He's also opened a "peeking under the hood" thread, & promised to update frequently.... So send him the good stuff that you see.
  
• Steve Rubel reports that the "public feeds on private blogs" bug that he exposed has now been resolved.
• BlogHacker reports 8 new features and 8 new issues. To be fair, most of the issues will be resolved with time and the full rollout of Blogger beta features, but the post is a balanced look at the current state of play.
• Turning up the geek factor to maximum, Bloggers Buzz points to the new Blogger API and suggests some of the promise thereof.
• Instabloke counsels patience, testing, & waiting to play w/ the full suite of tools. Good call!
  
• Avatar at Bloggeratto finds a good conspiracy theory in the phased rollout. Hmmmm! Elvis is alive and well and living in Mountain View.... right next to Han Solo frozen in Carbonite.
  

Plenty of discussion as this news has spread. Check out the T'rati graph of posts that contain the terms Blogger Beta over the last 7 days. The wave is growing, with more than 1000 posts Thursday & half that already today:

Julie and I have had identical experiences w/ the Windows Live Writer, and identical responses. I don't know what the .Net framework is, but I haven't needed it 'til now, & I'm not sure I want it.

Imagine, a Microsoft product that requires other Microsoft products before it will work. Who'da Thunk! For reviews and other good stuff, see the post that I wrote before I tried to install it!

Filed in: blogtech webtech windows_live_writer reviews

Rather than letting grievances fester, I'm all for rolling up the sleeves and making a contribution. I guess I'm just a positive person like that. Last week I complained about the limitations of the delicious interface when it comes to managing tags. This week, I've started poking around further in their interface, figuring out more "improvements". By way of proof of concept, I've integrated Knallgrau's tagthe.net automatic tagging webservice (see earlier experiments) with this Delicious.

First, a few words on the wisdom of doing this. Delicious actually does a reasonable job of prompting you for tags under their "full-screen edit" (albeit not in their inline edit mode). It's also not particularly useful to have people ("sheeple") copying tags wholesale - and even less so when those tags are machine generated. That said, this might be useful for those times when you have "tagger's block" or you've sourced a bunch of URLs and want to get some quick-and-dirty structure across them before refined tagging can begin.

In light of recent developments, I'm also expecting a rush of people retro-fitting tags to their content, so it's good to get some practice in with this. It's also a nice little learning project for me on hacking the delicious interface to handle the much-needed batch-mode. Finally, it's just plain cool watching all those empty text fields magically fill up with content!

Oh, and I doffs me hat to the folk at Knallgrau; the tags their baby generates aren't half bad in most cases. It errs on the side of verbosity (so do I!), but that's beneficial for this situation. Let's hope they stick at it and don't go the way of Tagyu.

The use of it is pretty straightforward: visit your delicious page and press "edit" on any bookmarks you wish to treat (as many as you like). The code is activated by clicking a bookmarklet on your browser. (Alternatively, you can just paste in the javascript for a one-off effort.) The bookmark's title and tags are automagically populated and you can make further changes before clicking save. It also works in the "full-screen edit" mode (where you have just one bookmark to edit and you get a list of your tags plus suggestions).

Installation is easy and takes just a moment. If you're running FireFox, you should be able to just drag the link below onto your links bar. If not (or your stuck with IE), just drag any old shortcut out of your Favourites folder and onto your links bar while holding down control (this makes it a copy). Then, right-click the link below and copy it (eg "copy shortcut"). You should now have the code on the clipboard. Finally, do a right-click and edit-properties on your cloned favourite. Make the name something like "Auto-Tagger" and then paste the code into the URL field (it should start "javascript: ... "). You may be prompted something about safety - just click OK.

That's it! Take it out for a test run and see what it makes of your existing tags.

As usual, feedback, troubleshooting and suggestions in the comments please.

Auto-Tagger (drag or copy this link)

Source Code

Oh - and sorry about the name "Auto-Tagger". I acknowledge it's unbearably lame but it's nearly 2am here and I'd be delighted to changed it to something suitably witty tomorrow.

Filed in: blogtech, tags, bookmarklets, tagthe.net, del.icio.us

Like many blogs, this is a two-pronged blog..... There are the "hey did you see?" posts that steer readers & subscribers to interesting content elsewhere in the blogosphere, & then there's the more substantial, meaty, original posts that we want you to read, inwardly digest, and act upon by adopting the suggested hack or exploring the reviewed service! So... how can bloggers (ourselves included) feature and draw attention to certain content within our blogs, & keep critical content alive once it falls off the front page? Some thoughts, in no particular order:

1. Exclusivity: Be the only person writing about your topic. If there are only a half-dozen posts that discuss Creamaid, for example, you'll be in great shape to have your content found and enjoyed.
   
2. Internal Links within Posts: String your own related posts together in a way that will make sense to your reader, and lead them to explore your content. Add "see also" links to your posts as you publish them, whether at the end of the post or in the body, in "as we discussed last week" style.
   
3. Categories: Use categories on your blog to organise your content. This will assist folks in following a content thread through your whole blog. Blogger Beta's new labels will make this a much more straightforward process. Maintain a "highlights" category or similar that prominently features the posts that you consider to be critical content.
   
4. Sidebar Menus: Use menus on your site to provide obvious and direct links to critical content. Hand code a series of links or a drop-down if that will work for you.
   
5. Prominent Site Search: Don't hide the blogger navbar... The search box can be your site's best friend. Add the Technorati site search box too.... Get the most out of site search with a version, such as Aditya's, that provides post previews within your template.
   
6. Community: If you're lucky enough to be active in a blogging community, e-mail your colleagues to alert them to the good stuff. Use the for: tag on Del.icio.us to (selectively) push your posts to members of your community who will be interested.
   
7. Comments and Trackback: Comment judiciously on related posts with a link to your own. Continue the dialog on your own blog in the comments, and take the opportunity to direct your readers to related critical content as the opportunity arises. Use trackbacks to your source posts to draw attention to your part in the conversation. If you don't trackback every post, be sure to trackback your critical posts. Offer a comment feed (easy w/ the new Blogger) so that readers can keep up with the ongoing discussion on older posts.
   
8. Prime your content to be shared virally: Bookmark posts in a shared bookmark manager so that they're ready to be discovered and cloned. Pre-populate social / distributed / voting type link services. Provide buttons for voting / sharing / cloning / storing and emailing your links. Use tags to draw attention to posts on your blog. If you don't tag everything, tag your critical posts.
   
9. Judicious branding of your blog. Take advantage of Technorati's blog tags service to advertise the content that readers can expect. Use sub-titles in your blog header to explain your focus.
   
10. Create a "hub-post" such as Blogger Hacks - The Series that will serve as an entry point and response point for multiple readers. Direct those readers to both internal and external content of a high quality and related topical focus.
    

How else do you draw attention to the critical content on your blog? Let us know!

Submitted to Darren Rowse's Group List-Writing Project, which is a hub-post, of course, and will be prominently featured on multiple blogs, I'm sure... especially since this time, submitting a post to the project carries with it the possibility of a hefty prize. (Mmmm, prizes!)

Filed in: blogging

Have you checked the comment notification e-mails for your beta blog? The information ID of the commenter and the title of the post that has been commented are now front and center.

This used to be somewhat buried in the footer of the mail. A small thing, to be sure, but an indication that this has been a comprehensive refit. Good call, Blogger! Now it is much easier to see where the discussion is happening, and (at least in the example above) to link to the Blogger profile of the commenter. I wonder what this will look like if the user is anonymous or is not on Blogger?

Filed in: google blogger blogtech webtech beta

See also:

• Beta Templates, Layouts, & Tags
• Under The Hood: Blogger's New Labels
• Blogger Beta Explored
• Significant Blogger Upgrade

Pete leaves a comment clarifying some of the new tools, and the situation re: existing templates etc. I've reposted in full since this explains the labels, layouts and existing templates issue, which was on my "have to figure this out asap" list. Thanks once again, Pete, for the insights:

If you migrate your blog, your template will be preserved as-is. It's in what we call "Classic" template mode. It will be dynamically served, but you won't get the drag-and-drop customization. You also won't get labels.

New blogs have Layouts by default, but can switch to Classic mode (there's a button on the Edit HTML subtab page).

You will be able to upgrade from Classic to Layouts, but, as the Layouts template language is completely different (but significantly improved), you'll lose your prodigious customizations. We make a best effort to save straightforward changes (sidebar lists, for the most part) but your milege will decrease the further you have gone from the stock templates.

You can see that there's a "View Classic Template" button on the Edit page, which is there to make it easier to copy over anything that the upgrade missed. (I'm going to a have a fun time w/ my blog... might just take the opportunity to design a new one.)

I'm excited to see what folks will come up with when Layouts's Edit HTML is available. Dragging and dropping in the official templates is fun, but doing it with your own template design is even better.

Oh, and as for mass-labeling, there's no interface for that. You can, however, use the new Gdata API (based on Atom 1.0) support to change labels. Atom categories === Blogger labels.

It seems, then, that dynamic loading works w? your old template after migration, & that what we're looking if we want to access labels and drag & drop is the eventual need to re-create a template in the new format. No immeditate pressure to do so, though, which is grand, & methinks the labels will be worth it, esp. given that there's an existing layout insert for custom blocks of HTML / Scripts & a way to view your existing template to grab the goodies.

Filed in: google blogger blogtech webtech beta

See also:

• Under The Hood: Blogger's New Labels
• Blogger Beta Explored
• Significant Blogger Upgrade

Being unable to help myself, I thought I'd have a quick peek at the label system.

The logical structure of the page (including "widgets" like archives, feeds etc) seem to be encoded in a strange markup and dumped in a giant string in the header. This string is the sole parameter of a function called "_WidgetManager._Init". This function is invoked on page load and is defined in this external script. At this point, my brain boggled and I needed a lie down.

The actual taglabel names and counts are not in the header object literals - they make an appearance via a plain old unordered list in the sidebar. In my view, this is not a good place to keep such crucial information. It should be out in the wider world, making itself useful and mingling with others of its ilk. (Perhaps this will be supported in Blogger's Atom API - but I don't see it.)

To that end, I knocked together a little fragment of (ugly, unsafe) code to extract the labels and counts into a JavaScript object and read it back to you:

javascript: var rexp=/search\?label=(\S+)/i; var cexp=/.*(\d).*/i; var labels={}; var links=document.links; for(var i=0; i<links.length;i++) if (l=rexp.exec(links[i].href)) if (!links[i].rel) labels[l[1]]=cexp.exec(links[i].nextSibling.nodeValue)[1]; for (var j in labels) alert(j+' ['+ labels[j]+']')

(load up a beta blog and copy/paste this code into your browser address bar to watch the magic unfold.)

Here's another code snippet to transform Google's labels into a form a little more familiar to delicious JSON feed users:

javascript: var rexp=/search\?label=(\S+)/i; var cexp=/.*(\d).*/i; var labels={}; var links=document.links; for(var i=0; i<links.length;i++) if (l=rexp.exec(links[i].href)) if (!links[i].rel) labels[l[1]]=cexp.exec(links[i].nextSibling.nodeValue)[1]; var str="if(typeof(Delicious) == 'undefined') Delicious = {}; Delicious.tags = {"; for (var j in labels) str+='"'+j+'":'+labels[j]+','; str+="};"; document.write(str);

Does that get your creative juices flowing?

Filed in: blogtech, blogger, freshtags, blogger-hacks, del.icio.us beta

See also:

• Blogger Beta Explored
• Significant Blogger Upgrade

In addition to the Freshblog intro, here's some great posts that walk through the new service. Interesting to see the subtle differences in who noticed what..... Go check out

• Mashable
• Google Blogoscoped
• Digital Inspiration
• Micro Persuasion
• The Blog Herald
• TechCrunch
• Ionut
• ProBlogger
• Bloggeratto
• The Last Word
• A Consuming Experience
• BlogHacker
  

Filed in: google blogger blogtech webtech beta

See also:

• Significant Blogger Upgrade

So I was eating lunch, or sleeping, or something, and Microsoft rolled out Windows Live Writer, a stand-alone desktop blog post writer and editor that is Blogger-compatible. I have downloaded it to mess with at my leisure, & in the meantime, permit me to link to some judicious reviews from elsewhere in the blogosphere to explain, critique and evaluate the tool:

• Paul Stamatiou approves, and provides a full walkthrough with screenshots. Paul also requests a feature that would give icon designers a side project for weeks... See the end of the It is Still Beta section for the scoop.
  
• Chris Garrett at Performancing has a review that starts to make comparisons between Performancing for Firefox and Microsoft's offering. I would love to see this thread developed. (Browser Extension vs. Stand Alone, Online vs. Offline etc)
  
• Zoli points out the limitations of Live Writer as an offline blogging platform, and the seeming disconnect between Writer and Windows Live, which is supposed to be "all about the web..." He also highlights the absence of integrated tagging. A commenter there points to Tim Heuer's tagging plugin, which is not available yet, apparently, but is on the way.
• Amit at Digital Inspiration has a couple of good articles too... One is an introduction, which emphasises the "offline preview" feature (your post is formatted in a downloaded copy of your template, & so the preview is a